Pan’s Labyrinth

Coming home last night with a new TV (see last post) was going to be a frustrating experience as we have not as yet got an aerial, cable or satellite service to hook it up to. However, since we’d decided to go with a set that had a built in DVD player, we did have an option for some audio-visual entertainment. Thus our last stop of the day was ‘Movieworld’, our local DVD rental place. Miri got a free membership card and then we browsed the shelves looking for English films. This was remarkable easy since 99.9% of the DVDs in there were the original American releases (some had a Spanish audio option or subtitles). After short-listing several contenders we settled on a film called “Pan’s Labyrinth”, which we’d both heard good things about but had not seen.
Once home we got the TV setup and settled down to watch, only to find the only audio options were in Spanish! I was so mad, I couldn’t believe we’d accidentally picked up a Spanish version of the film (the DVD case was all in English). A little bit of research later and we discovered that we’d managed to select a film that was actually set in Spain, directed by a Mexican and therefore… shockingly… originally filmed in Spanish!! Would you believe it? I eventually appreciated the irony…

Fortunately it had English subtitles, so we watched it anyway. It was OK, not the best nor the worst film we’ve seen this year. Not sure it was worth the 96% fresh rating it got on Rotten Tomatoes though…